The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani Read Free Book Online

forward on folded arms; not more than twenty-five yards away. She looked up at me from below: near enough for me to see her eyes;
    which were light and large (too large, perhaps, in those days, in her small thin child’s face).
    “What are you up to, down there? I’ve been watching you for ten minutes. Sorry if I woke you, though. And . . . bad luck!”
    “Bad luck? Why?” I stammered, feeling my face turn red.
    I had hauled myself up.
    “What’s the time?” I asked, more loudly.
    She glanced at her wrist watch.
    “I make it three,” she said, with an attractive grimace, and then:
    “Bet you’re hungry.”
    I was completely at a loss. So they knew too ! For a moment I even thought they must have heard of my disappearance straight from my father or mother: by telephone, of course, like an endless lot of others. But Micol put me right at once.
    “I was at the school this morning, with Alberto, to see the results. You must have felt pretty sick about it, didn’t you?”
    “What about you, did you get through?”
    “We don’t know yet. Maybe they’re waiting to see how all the other outsiders have done before they put up the marks. But why don’t you come down? Come nearer, so I shan’t have to shout myself hoarse.”
    It was the first time she had spoken to me; in fact, it was the first time, to all intents and purposes, I had ever heard her speak. And from the start I noticed how much her pronunciation resembled Alberto’s. They both talked in the same way: slowly, as a rule, underlining particular and quite unimportant words, the real meaning and weight of which they alone seemed to know, and slurring oddly over others, which you might have thought much more important. This they considered their real language: their own special, inimitable, wholly private deformation of Italian. They even gave it a name: Finzi-Continian.
    Slithering down the grassy slope, I ended up at the bottom of the garden wall. Although it was shady-a shade that stank high of stinging nettles and dung-it was hotter down there. And now she looked at me from above, her blonde head in the sun, as calm as if ours were not a casual, absolutely chance meeting, but as if, since we were small, we had met there more often than you could count.
    “You’re fussing,” she said. “What does it matter, having to take an exam again in October?”
    Obviously shewas teasing me, and even despising me a little. It was pretty much what you might expect, after all, to happen to someone like me, the son ofsuch commonplace, such “assimilated” parents: a semi-goi, in fact. What right had I to make such a fuss?
    “I think you’ve got some rather funny ideas,” I answered.
    “Have I?” she said, and grinned. “Then will youjust tell me, please, why you haven’t been home for lunch today.”
    “How d’you know that?” I let slip.
    “Aha, our spies told us. We’ve got our network, you know.”
    It was Meldolesi, I thought, it couldn’t be anyone else (and in fact I was right). But what did it matter? Suddenly I realized that this business of my failure had slipped into second place, a childish matter that would settle itself,
    “I say, how d’you manage to stay up there?” I asked. “Like at a window.”
    “I’m standing on my dear old ladder,” she said, accentuating the syllables of“my dear old” in her usual possessive way.
    A loud barking arose at this point from beyond the wall. Micol turned her head and glanced over her left shoulder with a mixture ofboredom and affection. She pulled a face at the dog, then turned to look at me.
    “Bother,” she remarked calmly. “That’s Yor.”
    “What breed is he?”
    “He’s a Great Dane. He’s only a year old but he practically weighs a ton. He’s always trailing after me. I often try and cover up my tracks, but he always finds me after a bit, you can count on that. It’s ghastly .”
    Then, as if following straight on:
    “Would you like me to